T.X. Watson's Pre-EVENT blog

I'm about to click on the first half of Atlas Shrugged in Netflix. I don't know how long I'm going to make it into this movie, from what I've seen in commercials it looks like it's going to be unforgivably preachy. But I'm also curious.
It starts following a train in 2016, so, there's an optimistic view of the future of government oppression -- more public transportation. We're out of gas and oil, so the trains are apparently a last resort. But I'm betting the message of this movie isn't going to be "Trains are awesome." In fact, one ends up derailing, apparently, right at the beginning because the tracks aren't maintained.

I was under the impression that the plot of this movie was supposed to be about government incompetence, but what it looks like is everyone-incompetence. It's corporations responsible for the poorly maintained railroads.

It looks like the hero of this movie is a woman who proudly doesn't care about people, and the bad guy -- at least, the first bad guy we see -- is an executive who tries to avoid servicing monopolies and puts effort into areas outside his own backyard. Pointedly, Miss Taggart, the heroic sociopath, is saving the day by going to a metallurgist who faces widespread criticism for his awful metal, who himself throws away appointment requests with people in a position to evaluate his work, on the basis that she studied engineering in college and is therefore qualified to decide that the metal is secretly perfect.

Reardon, the metal salesman, heroically squeezes as much money from her crisis as possible, and she explains that she doesn't have any emotions again. He also heroically forgets his wedding anniversary. He had already bought her a gift, though. To celebrate the fact that he has a contract for his country.

So... The point of this rant sounds like "Some of the rich people are the lynch-pins of the whole civilization, and without them everything falls apart." And they're "On strike."

This ten-minute video cuts off in a way that suggests to me that it's not the whole rant. But, if I may attempt to summarize:

(a.) Popular morality is inherently destructive to civilization. (b.) The main premise of popular morality is 'people should be nice to each other, to the exclusion of themselves.' (c.) The alternative to popular morality is being rational, and (d.) Rationality is inherently anti-kindness-to-others.

This argument sounds good, because all of its premises are really close to reasonable premises. For example, take these alternate terms: (a.) There are systems of morality that are destructive to civilization, (b.) One of the flaws these systems feature is an impulse of self-destruction in pursuit of others' welfare, (c.) We must therefore evaluate our moral systems through rational methods, and (d.) Reason doesn't come pre-loaded with any moral answers.

The conclusion of the first set of premises is "Everyone should be super-selfish, but think more than two hours into the future while doing so." The doctrine of rational self-interest that is the main pillar of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. The problem with that conclusion is that it argues there is a predetermined moral premise, that one should maximize one's material self-interest as determined by a zero-sum accounting of all the stuff that happens to exist at the time you're thinking this through.

The sort of similar, but much less overreaching, conclusion of the second set of premises is "A moral system that (a.) is interested in maximizing well-being for people, and (b.) is applicable to any given person who wants to pursue morality, should not have an actively negative effect on the well-being of its practitioners." This doesn't fall into the same hole as the rational self-interest argument does, because it leaves the moral assumptions as they are -- assumptions that are outside the realm of reason -- but it doesn't therefore conclude "Thinking about morality is nonsense and no-one should do it."

Rand conflates acting against one's self-interest and acting in a way that serves the interests of anyone else. It's obviously not inherently true, and fortunately it's also not true in real life, that there's nothing people can do that can improve both their own livesand the lives of other people.

I'd like to make it clear here, before I post this, that my point is that Ayn Rand is wrong; not that the inverse of Ayn Rand's philosophy is right, or that the philosophies she was arguing against are right.

So, this got away a little bit from watching part 1 of Atlas Shrugged. But that movie kind of made me feel nauseous. So, there's that.